Blogs from Pelorus Sounds, Marlborough, South Island, New Zealand, Oceania

As we had hoped the weather has turned out fine this morning and this gave us confidence that a side trip to French Pass would be a worthwhile exercise as we drove to our next stop in Nelson. With the aim of arriving in Nelson by around 4pm we needed to be on our way from TeMahia by around 9.30am and we managed this successfully. It didn’t seem to take as long to cover the distance back to the highway as it did going in on Monday and perhaps that was down to our thought that there may be some more challenges on the French Pass that might eat up a bit of time and we wanted to keep the hammer down. The town of Havelock was just a short distance further on and we decided ... read more

Slow and lazy awakening despite the early night. Perhaps I was tired. A light drizzle is creating rainbows over the bay so I sit outside the cabin with a short series of cup of coffee watching water move through the air. The Tuis and ducks are providing entertainment. Then Lester appears and we talk about life. Before we know it, we've been talking for more than three hours (subjects far too varied to recount here but Lester descends from John Bull (one of the first pioneers here, creating a deep sense of background guilt) and is an engineer and boat designer whose boats appear all over these islands so discussing the world with him is a bit like walking through some of Pirsig's deeper chapters). A neighbour's tractor maintenance issue (snapped rim) drags Lester away. It's ... read more

Arrived at the Copthorne Millenium Hotel where we were basing ourselves for the next two nights. Managed to sneak into the restaurant before it closed and a couple of rib-eyes were washed down with a very nice local Pinot Noir. The next morning saw us taking the hire car back to the airport in Blenheim where we'd arranged to meet our driver for the day - George also known as 'Aussie' Two other people joined us in the mini bus and we immediatley headed for the Cloudy Bay vineyard. A very good tasting of 7 of their finest wines (no spitting out I can assure you!). Next stop a small family run vineyard called Bladen. Excellent tasting of 5 wines (still no spitting) and I purchased an excellent bottle of the botrytis desert wine (or 'sticky' ... read more

Four seasons in one day and a couple of spliffs :) Well we were right about the weather change driving back from Kiakoura; it was as though the rain had never happened when we got back to Picton. We went back to the same campsite we had been on before desperate for a shower as we hadn’t had one for two days (what with our freedom camp on the Kiakoura coast). Unfortunately our stomachs had got the better of us and we had stopped briefly at MacDonald’s for a milkshake which made us 10 minutes behind - the exact amount of time we were late for the camp shop to be open where we had to buy our shower tokens!! Oh well we’ll do some of our washing instead - nope didn’t have the right coinage ... read more

I spent a wonderful week on a refuge island in the Marlborough Sounds assisting DOC in their valuable work in saving endangered spices. This was a week like no other. Once we got through the strict quarantine procedures on the mainland to make sure we weren't harboring any nasties who might wreak havoc on the protected island we were welcomed ashore with freshly baked gingerbread men, with our bright yellow fish bins of essentials! Firstly we were isolated. There were no more than 12 people on the relatively small island (see map for location) for the whole week that i was there, 2 Irish, 2 American (team international), 3 kiwi and one German (the island family)...with a few others visiting. Then there were the tens of thousands of frogs (Maud Island frogs - found no where ... read more